Is the profession of science broken (a possible cause of the great stagnation)? Fabius Maximus (furzy mouse)
Fukushima radiation still poisoning insects Science
The Population of the Internet Barry Ritholtz
Google case may be bigger than Microsoft Financial Times. “Case” = “European antitrust case“.
Julia Gillard’s memoir is insightful, unflinching and revealing Guardian
South China Sea: Still no evidence of historical Chinese claims ThaiVisa (furzy mouse)
When a $210 Million Bet Goes Bad: Investors Stage Shadow Bank Protest in Beijing WSJ MoneyBeat
New Zealand elections: dirty tricks helped John Key win another term Guardian (Richard Smith)
ECB’s Draghi takes up new weapon in war on deflation Financial Times. Scott:
The problem is that the “solution” of QE and his precedent moves have lowered interest rates to such an extent that they’ve induced capital flight out of Germany in search of higher yield, and that capital flight is deflationary. And given that you want inflation in Germany in order to address the imbalances between the north and south, it’s a completely self-defeating policy, accomplishing the opposite of what its goal ought to be.
Eurozone Composite Signals Slowdown; French Private Sector Output Decline 5th Month; German Manufacturing Approaches Stagnation Michael Shedlock
Germany’s Economic Mirage Project Syndicate
Germany’s Eurosceptic AfD spells end to Europe’s false calm, warns S&P Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph
The United Kingdom Nearly Died for Margaret Thatcher’s Sins Bob Kuttner, American Prospect
Sting of Betrayal: George Soros and Cristina Kirchner Wolf Street. A tad overwrought but the general point holds.
Ukraine
NATO: Russia Has Withdrawn Many Troops From Ukraine Wall Street Journal
Ukraine May Need Far More Foreign Aid to Rescue Its Economy WSJ Economics
Syria/ISIS
US says attacks on Isis could last years Financial Times
Airstrikes Only Opening Move in Fight Against Extremists Bloomberg. Lordie.
A Pentagon Video Shows Islamic State Targets Getting Obliterated During US-Led Airstrikes in Syria Vice. A visitor from overseas commented on the intensity of the propagandizing, that generals and majors dominated the newcasts, and insisted that the airstrikes had wiped out the striking power of a heretofore unheard of terrorist group that had fiendish plans for the US and therefore had prevented “harm to the homeland”. He said that phrase was repeated again and again.
Bill Maher mocks gullible America for missing the real enemy Daily Kos (furzy mouse)
Obama Administration’s Game of Geopolitical Terrorist Whac-a-Mole Expands With Strikes in Syria Kevin Gosztola, Firedoglake. Details on the propaganda campaign our alert visitor noticed.
Concealed By U.S. Airstrikes Israel Opens Nusra Path To Lebanon Moon of Alabama
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Reprivatising the internet: how physics helps you hide from spooks New Statesman (Chuck L)
Before they could track cell phone data, police had to sign a NDA with the FBI MuckRock
More cops are wearing body cams. When will the footage be a public record? Columbia Journalism Review
Girl killed in U.P. hunting accident Escanaba Daily Press. The “hunting accident” was the discharge of a rifle in a car, apparently by another child in the back seat. In a sad bit of synchronicity, my brother, who forwarded this story and generally approves of hunting, sent me a story two days ago from his company newletter of a six year old shooting a buck. His remark: “This is legal in Michigan under the ‘mentor’ program, if you can believe it!”
Pfizer Seeking Inversions Shows Companies Unfazed by Lew Bloomberg
Report: SEC Probing Pimco For Artificially Boosting Returns Business Insider
Home Depot’s former security architect had history of techno-sabotage ars technica. Bet we are going to see more of that (as in internal sabotage, not necessarily precisely this type) with the widening chasm between disposable workers and upper management.
Whither Markets?
Interpreting the Yield Curve: Some Pictures Econbrowser
US tax clampdown paves way for European raid on American corporate jewels Telegraph
Banks face fresh curbs on leveraged loans Financial Times. Leveraged loans finance leveraged buyouts, um, private equity, which helps boost stock prices….although nowhere near as much as the tidal wave of stock buybacks.
Class Warfare
Bill Clinton: Profits won’t be priority No. 1 in the future CNBC (furzy mouse)
Republicans for wealth redistribution? Fortune
More Americans Forgo Marriage as Economic Difficulties Hit Home WSJ Economics. Wait, aren’t we in a recovery?
Antidote du jour (furzy mouse):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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“Is the profession of science broken (a possible cause of the great stagnation)? ” Spot on. I spent the last part of my career in a university so good that I could indulge myself both by taking my teaching seriously, and by researching whatever took my fancy. No youngster could possibly take the same gambles and hope to have a secure career. In fact, the very sort of youngster you should really want to appoint would probably have cleared off out of academic life, because otherwise he’s faced with a grind after his first degree: a long, slow PhD, possibly being exploited as a lab hand, then two or more post-docs – still not able to work on questions of his own choice. Then the grind to get tenure, and consequently the pursuit of “sure thing” unexciting research, plus the endless hours applying for research grants, and despising himself for supplying the untruths and exaggerations required. It’s become a hateful way of life. I made damn sure my daughter, who had flirted with the idea, went off to do something else.
Good grief….
dearieme and myself are in agreement…
Tho’ old boy its not well played to fiddle with inquisitive minds over pay packets… or accolades…
skippy… you should know better…
If “no money equals you die” then it makes sense to talk about pay packets. And if science now means no sure pay packet and a living death in the meantime, then dissuading the young from setting out upon that road of broken glass might be the decent thing to do.
The Physicist Lee Smolin in his book The Trouble with Physics said that the system in his discipline was broken for several reasons, most prominent being the fetishizing of mathematical skills over imagination, instincts for the spacial/physical, and philosophical insight. He said that Ph.D. advisors look for quick, brilliant number-crunchers to help them with their own work and ignore all other skills and abilities in favor of recruiting and retaining mathematical savants. This just reinforces the obsession with incredibly abstract and perhaps unprovable (but mathematically beautiful) ideas like String Theory, which has become a dogma, the only “respectable” thing to study and work on in the elite graduate programs. Since all the really “top” people want to do High Energy Physics (or Cosmology, i.e. Inflation and its permutations), and there is scant new data being produced by a tiny number of cutting edge supercolliders, they have largely cut loose from experimental data into the wild, wild world of mathematical abstractions. Everyone in the field is happy and nothing practical gets produced.
need that practical stuff, yes, but I think the “abstract and perhaps unprovable (but mathematically beautiful) ideas,” the “wild, wild world of mathematical abstractions”…I think this kind of stuff’s important, too. Like the arts.
“the fetishizing of mathematical skills over imagination, instincts for the spacial/physical, and philosophical insight…and that Ph.D. advisors look for quick, brilliant number-crunchers to help them with their own work and ignore all other skills and abilities…” Those are different issues (even if related in some ways) that should/could be addressed while not dismissing or minimizing the value of the above.
Probably an aversion to get their hands dirty.
On the other hand, math is pure (or pure math, rather than, applied math, is).
Maybe, that’s why people think computer programming is a ‘green job,’ as it produces no carbon and nothing ‘dirty’ can be seen.
Never mind the program is used to aid designing drones or help with fracking.
That great Athenean tradition that physical work makes the mind unfit seems to be the basis of the modern West, eh?
Are they just lazy American professor-wannabes?
Many hard-working (fill in any nation) PhD students would gladly slave away years to get a chance at the American Academic Dream.
First, we lost our fruit picking, construction and gardening jobs.
Now, we are losing teaching jobs to foreigners too?!?!?!
(Sarcasm).
After completing my Ph.D. and getting “the perfect job” as assistant professor in a major university, I soon realized that the academic system is, as you say, a system of continually deferred rewards, in which truly innovative research and/or creative work is actively discouraged until, after finally attaining tenure, one is too old and worn out to care. Three years later, after having been re-appointed, but faced with what I knew was going to be a major tenure battle, I decided to get out. That was 40 years ago, and I’ve never regretted it.
A retired gentleman in my circle of friends is a former CFO of one of the top pharmaceutical companies. He has often talked about how much trouble they had in hiring Ph.D. graduates from American universities. These people could write outstanding research papers, and quote dozens of prior research references off the top of their head.
But when placed in a laboratory setting and asked to look into a particular research avenue, they could not do raw, original research worth a damn. Gradually the company learned how to distinguish, and hire, only people who could produce new work, and new products for the company, but sadly these were more and more often people brought in from Europe or Asia.
The company gets flak to this day about their apparent preference for foreign scientists, but my friend explains, “We didn’t choose this as a policy. Never. We simply chose people who can produce lab results, not dissertations.”
” These people could write outstanding research papers, and quote dozens of prior research references off the top of their head.
But when placed in a laboratory setting and asked to look into a particular research avenue, they could not do raw, original research worth a damn.”
This makes no sense. “Outstanding research papers” are literally by definition composed of “raw, original research”. The notion that American universities have some kind of pharmacology productivity deficit by comparison to oh-so productive Asian and European private industry labs is a joke- the vast majority of research that pharma uses is produced in American universities and subsequently patented and sold on to industry, or is a joint partnership to begin with, with most of the actual basic research gruntwork done by PhD candidates.
My theory, well, it’s more like a hypothesis, is that American CEOs are too lazy to do the work, the research necessary to understand that American workers are not lazy.
Au contraire. They’re working 90-hour weeks to avoid becoming conscious of the research they’ve already done to that very effect. They have to, or their and/or our world comes crashing down. Flying aspidistras require continual care, tending and (most of all) belief.
“This makes no sense. “Outstanding research papers” are literally by definition composed of “raw, original research”. ”
Absolutely. I think the CFO is full of it.
I deal w/ a lot of private sector company PhDs and the Americans generally are the most effective in my experience taking concept to commercial scale. I have no doubt that American companies do have an affinity for foreign PhDs to do research grunt work with the perspective that they will more likely be satisfied remaining in the ranks of research grunts and will have a lower average carrying cost in the organization.
Another observation I will make, recently a client involved in high value energy related field caught and turned over to the Feds a Chinese national PhD employee in a research position that was transferring confidential data to relatives in China. This will have fundamental implications the employment policies in the organization going forward, much to the detriment of the honest foreign national employees.
Depends on what is considered original by the pharmaceutical industrial complex, I guess.
If they desire originally expensive drugs, maybe those relying on the company to sponsor their green-card applications can be very original.
“Here, let me have a crack at it. I am willing to work 24/7 to be original.”
All of these problems are real, but they’re not actually the cause of diminishing returns in the sciences. The article suggests that we don’t have teleporters and antigravity boots because of these dynamics. In fact, teleporters and antigravity boots were never going to be possible, and we have these dynamics in large part because the decline in actual research productivity (which is always baked into the cake- the easy, cheap problems to solve are always frontloaded) made it more and more difficult for researchers to justify their activities in the cost-benefit terms our society expects. Granting agencies now insist on “applied”, “translational” research because these projects tend to produce measureable economic returns, whereas high-risk basic research projects tend to produce lots of data that no one has the philosophical tools to interpret meaningfully, at best.
This is my intuitive sense. Gravity sucks. Period. To overcome the problem of making large concentrations of mass lighter than air, or to find a propulsion system that will elegantly overcome gravity without a bunch of external effects and without consuming ginourmous quantities of some unspecified fuel, that sort of thing would take a scientific paradigm breakthrough the likes of which we haven’t seen since the physics of atomic-level matter was settled to the degree it was by the mid-20th or so. We seemed to solve physics to a certain level, and what we see now in our inventions is more or less what we get from those breakthroughs. (I’m no scientist. Please bear with any inaccuracies I may be making here.)
This is not to say that the bureaucratic inhibitions upon research are not lamentable, nor have kept us from going as far as we should have gone by now (Thorium energy anyone?) I just don’t know about flying cars and stuff like that.
Philip Mirowski’s Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (2011) guides us through the re-engineering of science and academics by our good friends in the Neoliberal Thought Collective.
Perhaps you will remember the neoliberal pitch: massively reduced time to market for fabulous “innovations,” along with luxuriant revenue streams for universities and the entrepreneurs who would run them. What has been delivered by this regime has been what Mirowski calls the “qualitative degradation in the character of the knowledge produced” in the guise of more and more patents of less and less worth, guarded and promulgated by swat teams of intellectual property lawyers. (The appearance of these latter suggest a way in which you can begin to see the answer to the question of how what looks like a clusterf*k to most folks looks like a very successful exercise in monetization to others.)
Through the entire comment thread your point was the glaring obvious agency and just as I was about to make the same observation, I came upon yours.
skippy… the quips about slavish mathematical attitudes in cosmology et al is miniscule as compared to the neoliberal shibboleth… Kudos
So, patent law allows scientific research itself to be owned, and so it is? Oy, vey!
Science has not escaped from the general decline of Western intellectual culture. If William James had written his Varieties of Religious Experience today he would have been lambasted by his intellectual peers much as John Mack was attacked for his studies about UFO abductees at Harvard–I think the fact that his research was pretty good and he had won a Pulitzer kept his job for him. I’m not making a point for or against what many of you would find unpalatable–I’m simply saying that American intellectual life has, with each passing decade, tended to limit the realm of what is possible to that which is measurable by instruments and assumes that our social consensus reality (anyone that has lived for awhile in other culture begins to see that these people often view reality very differently) is 100% accurate. One of the best examples of how to think about the world comes from Edwin Abbott’s famous book Flatland which describes the reaction of a sphere moving into a two dimensional world of shapes and how one “square” managed to understand the reality of the sphere and what the reactions of the authorities in Flatland were to this.
Science, to be pursued honestly, must doubt itself and not reject data that does not fit theory. Today we have a science that tends to use data to fit the theory–not always, of course, but where it can be done that is the default position in many university settings. This explains how easy it is for people to ignore datat, as I’ve often mentioned, about important historical events because actually pursuing the truth using scientific methods and practices used in forensic and criminal investigations may come up with answers that would create to much cognitive dissonance. I can give concrete examples, of course.
We need to change our view of science and be a little more humble with our grand theories and accept the fact that millions of people have seen strange things in the skies–I’ve talked to many of them and, yes, they act in a paradoxical way–but not if you’ve understood the implications of extra-dimensional reality that Flatland points to.
“Science, to be pursued honestly, must doubt itself and not reject data that does not fit theory.”
It’s often very difficult to challenge the existing paradigm in the sciences including medicine.
I guess it’s a mixture of things like turf, difficulty in (and/or discouragement from) thinking outside the box within which they’ve been taught/work- those questioning can be threatening – and of course funding issues. Probably other issues.
Anyway, it’s a lot more comfortable for many to stay within the comforts of the current way of thinking- and ostracize those who don’t. But then, too, a lot of “scientists” are really not much more than lab rat/ technicians, I would guess (not to denigrate the many good scientists- lots of them- just the system’s flaws).
re “the fact that millions of people have seen strange things in the skies.” it’s a fact millions of people think a lot of unsupported things…has there been any evidence to support these “sightings?” can’t help the skepticism here…
http://www.slate.com/blogs/thewrongstuff/2010/09/09/stress_doesn_t_cause_ulers_or_how_to_win_a_nobel_prize_in_one_easy_lesson_barry_marshall_on_being_right.html
As for UFOs the evidence is astonishingly good but largely circumstantial. Read Jacques Vallee and J. Allen Hynek (who originally worked for the USG to debunk all major sightings) in addition to John Mack if you want more on the subject. Skepticism but openness is the proper scientific stance.
“Then the grind to get tenure.” or just the grind as a low-wage adjunct without benefits with no tenure-track position in sight?
Universities should be re-organized as Zen monasteries, or something similar, which apparently they were in the Middle Ages.
That way, everyone can work there without having to be paid…as long as he/she is fed rice porridge every day and has a meditation futon for bed.
This idea came to me a couple of days while reading about professors living on food stamps.
let’s reorganize wall street like this. feed them rice porridge, give them a meditation bed, no pay…better yet, how about, at least some of them, a cell, a cot, and a job – no pay- say, picking up litter along the highways?
Those on Wall Street are better suited for insane asylums…until they are cured of their detachment from the real world that is Main Street.
“The United Kingdom Nearly Died for Margaret Thatcher’s Sins”: largely tosh. He doesn’t bother to mention that the first Scottish referendum was held in 1979, before ever Thatcher came into office. In that case the “yes” campaign got more than 50% of the votes cast, but not a large enough proportion of the electorate, and so lost under the rules at the time.
Supressio veri, eh?
I thought, for some, an end to the United Kingdom would be a good thing.
Would that make Thatcher a saint, with all her sins, or precisely because of her sins, as the article’s cause and effect title implies,for those favoring Scotland leaving?
Self-marketers have come to dominate journalism, as well. Ezra Klein, Megan McArdle, and other mediocre minds promoted themselves while toeing a neoliberal line, advancing from being dull bloggers into voices of the establishment media and new media.
Enforcement of orthodoxy by peers, a stigma against unconventional ideas, and – not mentioned by the essay – tilting in favor of those with power – all ways that capitalism shapes journalism, academia, and other aspects of modern culture.
Part of the problem is the American tendency to middle-man-ize everything. We live by committees. At least, though, this article recognizes a crisis in the sciences. In the humanities, we have lots of ultra-edgy intellectuals with tenure writing bilge that is being passed off as revolutionary. And then there are the departments of creative writing in which the students churn out acceptably commercial fiction by the pound. Finally, though, we have a diagnosis of stagnation. Finally, the word has been spoken.
Every American is entitled to their own tollbooth.
Unfortunately for most of us Americans, our tollbooth will probably be like the one that was given to Sonny Corleone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJU2cz9ytPQ
“The “hunting accident” was the discharge of a rifle in a car”: whoever was in charge of that rifle left it with the magazine in, in a car carrying children. He should be charged with a crime.
There ought to be some sort of rule that says that anyone who you wouldn’t allow to cross a street on their own should not have unfettered access to something that can kill another person. My God, it’s just common sense. What is wrong with people?
A kid young enough to believe in Santa has no business handling a gun.
This is what it’s like in Michigan. I grew up there. Every fall we had a classmate or two who got killed in a ‘hunting accident’. Many were, IMHO, murders, like the guy who shot his wife, claiming he thought she was a deer. People who lived on the outskirts of our small town regularly had their lawn deer and lawn geese shot up, dogs and cats, too, but at least they could get out of the way.
And then there was the guy across the road who got so disgusted with his tractor that he emptied both barrels into its radiator. Interesting folks, MIchiganders. Lots of these folks vote Republican, too. Not that it makes much difference.
Where I live the hunting accident that recurs annually involves an inebriated marksman tumbling 12-15 feet from his “deer-stand” and getting badly banged up.
If they can make child-proof medicine bottle caps, surely they can do something about guns…if they want to.
While they are at it, we can also use some childproof kitchen knives too…or maybe we already have them.
(Addendum)
Childproof knives – especially useful with the bad karma in the mass animal/vegetable killing zone known as the kitchen.
There is childproofing. All of the guns we own have trigger locks on them. We also don’t keep the guns and ammo together. All of our kids know guns are not toys(honestly my husband is really the only one who likes the things.) It really isn’t that hard to be a responsible gun owner. It’s laziness and stupidity that appear to be costing these kids their lives.
Your guns are not secure without a safe. All manners of prevention are laudable, but yours are accessible. Please think again.
Your certainty is impressive, but completely off the mark. A safe is necessary? Have you seen what they call a “safe” these days?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/marcwebertobias/2012/07/27/unsafe-gun-safes-can-be-opened-by-a-three-year-old/
Security is a process, not a product. You can’t buy a box and declare victory.
That’s article is also a good primer on “safes” in general. If you can pick it up, it ain’t a safe, whatever the guy making it claims.
Anything that looks similar to the models shown is better off used as a decoy. Buy the safe, lock it, put it under your bed.
Then go out and find a real safe for your valuables or armory.
There are already police service weapons with finger scanners. The question is not whether it can be done, but whether the empire shoving another unwanted money-making “feature” down the throats of an internal proletariat who are already quite fed up with that dynamic is going to go over well with that demo
Watching the “smart gun” debate is fun. Lots has been written on why smart guns will never be sold, for lots of different reasons. While I agree that technically it’s very difficult (zero false positives or negatives). The most important hurdle now is that there are already a few laws on the books that say that as soon as smart guns are available, they must be the only ones available for sale. Not surprisingly the NRA is a staunch opponent of smart guns. The industry follows.
and i thought the cockroaches were supposed to survive..
and i thought the cockroaches were supposed to survive..
Just the ones that eat radioactive plastic and poop Ice-nine will.
It’s a news flash that life forms that collect generations quickly show mutation? Maybe fruitflies should b used for genetic studies!.. oohh wait..
ooh, i’m gonna patent those bugs.
Ultimately they wont have to be organic
http://www.danielhwilson.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Robogenesis-Novel-Daniel-H-Wilson/dp/0385537093/ref=la_B001JP1TYG_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411585545&sr=1-2
stripmallland?
bigboxland?
monsantoland?
warland?
porkland?
(all apologies, land of jazz and gumbo and blues and vonnegut and thoreau and dr. king and cornbread and pollock and ellison..)
It was probably in the late 90’s, I was in the St Louis airport getting a connecting flight. Most of the people there don’t register, they are just obstacles to navigate around as you look for your departing gate. I noticed an older man, a slightly rumpled look about him, his face had a tired but slightly exasperated expression. I realized it was Kurt Vonnegut—and the sterile coldness of that airport scene vanished.
Did you call out, “God bless you, Mr. Rosewater!”? That’s what I would have done (or at least thought about doing).
i forgot to mention artis.
Re: ANZAC
I’m afraid that in Australia, as indeed in Canada and New Zealand, there has been a secular, possibly irreversible, shift to the right with the premierships of Abbott, Harper and Key, respectively; much like what had already taken place in the USA with Reagan and the UK with Thatcher.
This is a complicated psychological phenomenon based on the fact that people want to believe they are the good side in a black and white world and react with anger when that worldview is challenged. For example, Key won resoundedly in NZ partly because a bunch of lefty foreigners tried to discredit him and cast a shadow on NZ’s standing in the world and they would not stand for that. It is far easier to believe in one’s goodness as dogma than to actually do good. Moreover, fear rules politics. Just about every election in the recent past, with the exception of Obama 2008 where naivété won, fear has been the winner. In the Scottish referendum, it was the fear campaign that won; in the west, the fear of terrorism makes us re-elect those that scaremonger us the most and, therefore, appear to be doing something about it by committing the most egregious violations of our privacy. But the more we fear the more we actually put ourselves in danger because we incentivize our governments to justify the fear they sow. Threats of terrorism will fall on death ears if there never is a terrorist attack now and again to reignite the fear.
I am afraid that this tendency will hold permanently until the civilization’s fall. Like Nazi Germany, we may need to collapse completely before we see a return of sanity. In 2008, too, it seemed that the system was on the verge of collapse, though Obama gave the kelptocrats one last hurrah as they party on the Titanic’s upper deck. Maybe it’s just a phenomenon in declining economies and that there’s still hope for the left in the emerging world, but I’m not optimistic about neofascism going away any time soon. The best hope is to tackle individual issues one by one; otherwise we’ll be hopping from one disappointment to the next. It’s challenging enough not becoming bitter.
Well said.
Good enough to be said again: “This is a complicated psychological phenomenon based on the fact that people want to believe they are the good side in a black and white world and react with anger when that worldview is challenged.”
When warned of the fire storm that would ensue if evidence linking him to the JFK murder became know, Lyndon Johnson, a shrewd politician, shrugged it off. The piss-ants, he said — meaning the public — can be trusted always to believe what makes them most comfortable.
there’s a scene in the Godfather (part 1) after Michael offs his brother in law for his involvement in Sonny’s murder. After his sister confronts him about it, Kate turns to him and asks, devastated, “Michael, is this true?” Mike thinks for a second, smiles at her, and says ‘no’. Kate knew the truth but she wanted to believe him anyway.
Good point. Everything you need to know about politics is in the Godfather movies. Should be required for all High School students.
That quote also explains why Americans are docile at, and largely supportive of, the ‘green shoots’ of our new catastrophic war in the Middle East. Despite years of evidence, a mountain of corpses, that prove that our mischief over there breeds evil on an exponential scale.
Australia is the most developed economy endangered by Climate Change. It has the poorest soils, is 70% desert, and has below-average rainfall as it is. I thought the Abbot election was very much the kind of response mentioned above–the Aussies looked down the road at what was coming, and what would have to be done to mitigate what was coming, and what could not be mitigated, and then shrugged their shoulders and sold their souls to someone who told them that was all a bad dream and they could frolic on Bondi Beach, strip mine the country for coal and iron ore to feed the Chinese colossus, and watch the Great Barrier Reef go bye-bye in one last orgy of wanton consumption. The Order of the Day there and elsewhere is “Fuck the Future–let the good times roll.” Just don’t be around to tell them I told you so when the shit hits the fan, because those will be the first to be strung up when it all goes south (the plutocrats and their bought political and media retainers may get it next, or get out with their private security forces before the gallows go up in Canberra, Sydney, and Melbourne).
People react different when informed of their pending exits from this world.
Some splurge.
Some make sure others are taken care off.
Maybe there are some people who are better off not knowing about the pending climate doom…they will go for that ‘last orgy of wanton consumption.’
So, now, do we talk about it or do we not talk about it? How do I know what he/she will do?
‘the Aussies looked down the road at what was coming, and what would have to be done to mitigate what was coming, and what could not be mitigated, and then shrugged their shoulders and sold their souls’
The Aussies looked down the road at a vista of what was coming carefully prepared for them by the Murdoch-led media and unchallenged by the neutered and defunded public broadcaster (ABC), bought the equally well-curated campaign snake oil solutions and fell once again for the standard demonisation and ridicule of progressive opposition, shrugged their shoulders and walked like wide-eyed sheep into the booth.
A few short months later most of these docile and under informed sheep had turned feral, shocked, shocked I tell you, that the new improved Tony Abbott they’d swallowed hook line and sinker was a mirage, smarting like kids deprived of candy they’d been promised as they watched the leopard, his spots no longer obscured, prowl among them picking off the weakest and most vulnerable.
The parallels between the junior 5 Eyes members’ political ecology in recent years is striking and probably not co-incidental.
My neighbor, a liberal Democrat who voted for Obama, has his U.S. flag flying this morning … presumably to ‘support the troops’ on the Syrian front.
This is your Democrat party at war. Nothing’s really changed from fifty years ago, when ol’ Lyndon Johnson was ramping up the Vietnam campaign.
The only position in which I would display that stripety-ass yankee flag is upside down, signifying a dire emergency: the constitution has been suspended, and it’s not coming back.
What? You mean the Prezdint can’t declare war??!
Sheesh. What’s this oligarchy coming to?
It reminds one of the infamous day when the 0.01% started to robbing without declaring war on the 99.99%.
That was sneaky.
May I suggest that you never fail to describe him as if he were a doctrinaire Republican in all things, and basically ignore everything Democratic that comes out of his mouth (one might have trouble seeing any difference). It’s time for people to learn that social identities are a common pool resource and that the existing members are the judges of their own membership and who gets to join.
I believe there is another factor.
When one has to worry constantly about one’s FICO score, one doesn’t do anything rash.
“Are you KIDDING? I can’t do that. My score would be ruined!”
The gamification of debt slavery. Thanks, Fair Isaac!
So true. While I do complain about the big problems, and try to stay informed about them (out of morbid curiosity, if nothing else) I decided long ago that it was better to expend my energy working on small things that I had more control over than to spend all of it working on the big things that I have no control over. That’s why I quit the political world and just built a little village school in Nepal. Small and concrete is the way to go, imho.
Kierkegaard wrote about having an unnatural world-historical awareness in the mid-1800s: about how the knowledge of far-off events and large-scale problems that the modern media was flooding people with made it nigh on impossible for most to see–or to ethically address–the problems right in front of them. Of course, the situation has only worsened since then. Thus, a person today will express concern over the unemployment problem, but ignore a man on the street corner with a “will work for food” sign. A person with extra, unused bedrooms in their home will devote hours to volunteering to end homelessness, but will never invite a homeless person to share their house.
We might conclude, cynically, that the whole reason people are concerned with big, hairy, intractable issues at all is precisely because they cannot be expected to address them on their own. There is no personal sacrifice that one could make to end homelessness, so no sacrifice is required at all. Whereas, if we concerned ourselves with small, concrete problems, we might find that a sacrifice on our part might actually make an appreciable difference. And then we would have to feel bad if we decided not to make the sacrifice. If we only concern ourselves with the big problems, however, we’ll never have to feel guilty for making the selfish choice.
Respectfully disagree.
Individually we can and should, in the absence of comprehensive change, develop and nurture greater localism and confront each issue/problem individually or in small groups, but altering the general trajectory of decline and possible disaster simply has to be done on a larger scale.
For me this must take the form of fundamental change in the delivery of governance, featuring a shift from representative back to assembly democracy utilising the net to do so. If each issue is an element in a giant recipe for ‘A Better Future’ then, before paying attention to each ingredient we have first to consider the vessel in which we cook the meal. If we choose the best vessel we and our descendants stand a better chance of enjoying a tasty and nutritious meal ad infinitum, but importantly, each ingredient too is more likely to shine as it should.
i agree with you that those are things that must happen in order to build a fair and sustainable planet; i’m just saying that this could never, ever happen so you’re better off doing the little things. psychological and sociological constraints can be just as rigid as physical ones, so the only way the system can change is if it collapses.
Diptherio:
Precisely. I am painfully aware–as i expect everyone here is also–of the meta-phenomena that impacts all our little lives. Paunfully aware too, how little i can effect the big issues.
So i act when i can in the manner of the samiritan, although raised by marxists, and raise people up or releive their suffering when i can.
I stop to help elderly men in a blizzard get safely home. Give food to a hungry person. Reacue a cat crawling in an alley with a broken hip. Shepard a dozen homeless addicted street women through rehab, jails and shelters into jobs, or disability and into a real apartment. That last item has been a work of seven years. I dont really believe buying green alone will change the planet, we need real instituional and power arrangments fundamentally overhauled. But there is much we can do in our daily lives.
Agree with the gist of your comment, however, Key lucked out with one of the “lefty foreigners” you refer to being Kim Dotcom, a seamy figure and no stranger to the charms of crony capitalism no matter which side of the political spectrum one might toss him at a given moment. The cause may have been just, but the appearances were mixed at best and I suspect this played a real part in the outcome.
And surprising, considering just how much of Key’s (and his unofficial media dispenser Cam Slater’s) dirt got aired. I don’t even believe my vote is among those counted anymore.
“It is far easier to believe in one’s goodness as dogma than to actually do good.” AMEN!!
Why participate with give-and-take in a society to earn their conference of social identity when you can just buy one, hang it on your social networking charm bracelet and tell others wearing the same charm who and what they are?
I guess Bill finally decided he should start inhaling since there is no way in God’s green Earth that anyone with a lick of common sense looks at the economic climate we face today and decides the 1% are all of a sudden stop hoarding cash and start sharing with the workers who help create those profits of their own volition.
Political zombie BillClinton has another agenda: Softening up the electorate for InevitableClinton. Bill Clinton and Penny Pritzker bloviating about socially committed corporations–what could go wrong? And invocations of a market this is self-correcting and that will guide management toward new levels of concern for workers–at a time when we have every indication otherwise?
Hope: it’s a strategy, a dessert topping, and a floor wax, too!
As they used to say after narcotics raids in Bill’s SW Arkansas hometown:
Hey kids — no dope in Hope!
*exhales a perfect smoke ring*
…and a backwater town in Arkansas where charlatans are born. Had quite enough of hopium-peddling rope-a-dopes, thank you very much.
So Bill-Cliinton the anti-profit phophet. I’m not sure what one is supposed to even do with an article or a speech like that, but the hoi polloi may not afterall be the intended audience. “Corporations, someday, will care less about maximizing profits and more about employees and society” okay maybe … but I personally will believe it when I see it! But but it is necessary to attract talent. Maybe in a few rarified positions, but real unemployment and is it really necessary to attract talent? Everyone knows it’s not. And of course never any talk of say slave labor in other countries.
I thought a title like “Profits won’t be priority No. 1 in the future” was going to argue that social change of some sort was inevitable, but it’s not even that.
They don’t talk about slave labor, because at present, hydrocarbons are our slave labor, and they will need to be replaced as they become unavailable, and how exactly that happens, and who wins by it, is something that nobody really wants to think about.
Bill: “We don’t need no stinkin’ Glass Steagall, the market’s can regulate themselves.”
Oh, you really believe that powerful people got that way by speaking and working in accordance with values, instead of always playing the crowd in front of them? That’s cute.
Entertainment:
Slavoj Žižek on This is Hell 1 hour Chuck Mertz interview
https://soundcloud.com/this-is-hell/episode-818-zizek/s-A7Fjj
http://blogs.reuters.com/stories-id-like-to-see/2014/09/23/just-why-does-the-nfl-have-tax-exempt-status/
Yeah, why does it have tax exempt status???…………………………………………………Oh yeah, corruption.
Unfortunately (hmmmmm….maybe that should be, that fortunately most firms don’t get this issue brought up due to domestic abuse, i.e., did we really need domestic abuse to be able to put the spotlight on the NFL’s special privileges???) the vast majority of bizarre and irrational tax breaks will never see the light of day.
Isn’t the NFL a church that meets every Monday night?
don’t confuse non-profit with charitable…
the NFL like other many well known enterpises (MERS, commodity and stock exchanges), enjoys the legal playground of Delaware, which allows organizations to be non profit but NOT charitable…meaning…as long as there are only “members” or stake holders and no specific distribution of dividends or capital…then poof…you are a non-profit…most would be shocked that MOST non profits are NOT charitable, in that they are just conduits for the privileged…they are mostly “educational” organizations…meaning they distribute information for a cause…usually the cause of someone who wants to get into your wallet and convince you that you volunteered and were not mugged…it will not change…if you want to understand the world, and be shocked on a daily basis…forget roll call or the hill…get the federal register…its all there for anyone to see…but that requires reading…and concern and all the things that most wont do…(most meaning non NC readers)
Ah yes, the “educational” non-profits are also great places for covert HUMINT. I have some suspicions close to home.
Fresh from their massively overpriced online course at the Close Cover Before Striking School of Statecraft and Cosmetology, the BMD commanders of the Pentagon coined themselves a new phrase to say over and over:
Preventing harm to the homeland.
Your grade is F
http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/index.php?sum=367&p1=3&p2=3&case=70&p3=5
The ICJ ruled that use of force is prohibited by customary international law and jus cogens. The Court distinguished force in customary law between a “grave use of force” (armed attack) or a “less grave use of force” (e.g., threat of force). The Court restricted the right of self-defense to grave use of force: armed attack.
Now let’s spell it out for all the third-tier toilet lawyers and C+ high school dipshits who hadda go to work for the Pentagon.
– Sweaty Arabs shaking their fists in the general direction of the USA: not armed attack.
– Aerial bombardment in manifest breach of the UN Charter: armed attack.
Next remedial lesson: the crime of aggression.
Well, if there was such a thing as “international law” then you’d be on the money–actually there isn’t such a thing except as a childish belief. The post-WWII world of at least attempting to create international standards like the Geneva Conventions on War have been systematically been flouted by the USA, Israel and many other countries a particularly in the past decade or two. It is like the old Republic–it is dead–we have an Empire now and it rules, largely, by decree at least in the international sphere.
But, but, but—-Barack Obama, the Constitutional scholar and professor said!…. ;^ )
“”Obviously, our efforts to continue to go after extremist organizations that would do harm to the homeland is uppermost on our minds,” Obama said, promising additional civilian resources to help a stretched military.”
— Barack Obama, January, 2009, during his first visit to the Pentagon as commander in chief.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2009/01/29/obama_says_us_military_faces_difficult_decisions_ahead/
Obviously.
And, only yesterday 24 September, 2014, from the podium of the United Nations’ General Assembly chamber, Obama spoke of “taking out” terrorists–just like they do on wildly popular U.S. television crime-dramas. My first thought was of the various translators quickly rendering that phrase in scores of other languages.
Re Syria/ISIS — I posted the following on 9/22/14 but, thanks to my carelessness, it wound up on the wrong thread. One more try:
I disagree that ISIS has “plundered Mao’s playbook.” Mao’s tactics were those of classic guerrilla warfare: you hit hard with a superior force and then vanish into the woodwork. You avoid pitched battles with organized armies. You become close to the people in the area where you’re based, gaining their confidence and recruiting among them.
ISIS may have begun with such tactics, but recently they have abandoned them and have begun fighting in a more traditional manner, taking territory in pitched battles and then attempting to hold it by setting up conventional defense perimeters. Brimming with overconfidence, they see themselves, literally, as a “state,” or in their terms a “Caliphate,” an absurd designation which, ironically, they may have picked up from some of Glenn Beck’s more paranoid rants. Moreover, they have gone out of their way to intimidate and even terrorize the people in the regions they have conquered, a tactic that will eventually backfire, as increased resentment leads to subversion. Their supposed strength will ultimately become their weakness: in attempting to hold vast areas of the conquered territory they have stretched themselves thin and are now vulnerable to counter-attacks, which could come at any point along their weakly defended borders.
Their decision to present themselves as a state, rather than a revolutionary movement, and fight conventional battles in the old, 20th century manner, is a huge mistake, as they won’t be strong enough to take on a modern army. Moreover, this is not Afghanistan, where the Taliban can hide in the hills and in caves. This is desert country, where visibility from the air is unimpeded. Sure, they can mingle with civilians in the cities, but if they want to launch the sort of attacks needed in order to take over a country, they will need to come out in the open, and they will also need supply lines that will of necessity travel over desert terrain. This makes them highly vulnerable to air and artillery attack. Remember what happened to Saddam’s army when he attacked Kuwait. It’s true they’ve picked up lots of powerful US equipment, which makes them dangerous for the time being. But soon they will be needing spare parts, which won’t be so easy to find.
I give them 6 months, tops.
Oh and by the way, I do not agree with those who see the battle with ISIS as just one more example of misguided US meddling and militarism. While the war with Iraq was definitely a mistake, the war with ISIS is a very different matter. Left to its own devices, ISIS would be in a position to take over a huge portion of the Middle East, and terrorize those populations in a manner not seen since the heyday of Nazism. While the defeat of the self styled “Caliphate” would not necessarily protect us from domestic terror threats, as some govt. officials claim, it would free the region of a scourge comparable to some of the worst regimes in history.
“Oh and by the way, I do not agree with those who see the battle with ISIS as just one more example of misguided US meddling and militarism. While the war with Iraq was definitely a mistake, the war with ISIS is a very different matter. Left to its own devices, ISIS would be in a position to take over a huge portion of the Middle East, and terrorize those populations in a manner not seen since the heyday of Nazism. While the defeat of the self styled “Caliphate” would not necessarily protect us from domestic terror threats, as some govt. officials claim, it would free the region of a scourge comparable to some of the worst regimes in history.”
so they say. except now, the khorasian group is even worse, even more dangerous, even more scary. it’s as if we’re progressing through a video game and each enemy is worse than the last.
pretty soon, the enemy will be assad again after it is alleged, probably without any evidence, that he fired upon u.s. planes bombing one of those above existential evils.
I’m not saying the US isn’t reeling and possibly on the ropes. We are certainly in deep trouble thanks in part to our hegemonic meddling and our paranoia, and on many fronts. All I’m saying is that the battle with ISIS is different from the follies in which we’ve engaged in the past. Learning from past mistakes is not the same as unthinkingly doing the opposite of what we did before.
and I’m not saying that what we’re doing isn’t different this time – maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, I don’t know. I’m just saying that everything we know about ISIL we know from the people who want to bomb them.
ISIS was funded and armed from the outset by the US and Saudi Arabia. It is now funded by Saudi Arabia and the US (via non-existent “moderate” terrorist groups) and supported by Turkey and Israel. So apparently we are now at war with our own–and ongoing–creation. Or something like that.
All of this may just be an excuse and a cover to start bombing Syria. Or not.
While neocon strategy remains clear and consistent over the course of a decade and a half, and oddly parallels actual US actions, day-to-day policy seems to bounce from one extreme to another with utter incoherence that stinks of desperation. It is not just that we are being lied to (we are), but the truth itself may be sinking in a bog of conflicting delusions.
I think the US oligarchs are in a panic over the impending economic collapse.
–Gaianne
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Behind every so-called enemy if one is even slightly honest cannot help but find our own hubris and lies, our allies, weapons, red mist, cash, spooks. All led by lawless bribed cowards. You want an end to the al Qaeda of the week then first we must be something entirely different than who we are.
Yep. The genuine plan of the neocons — since the creation of al Quaeda during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan — has been to subvert and topple the various nation states of the Middle East that aren’t already American puppets.
This is done through creating chaos in the region, pitting state against state and tribe against tribe, making it easy to engineer an opening for us to come in and pick winners and losers. Winners are those who agree to be America’s pals, and stop objecting to Israeli expansionism.
When Dubya Bush invaded Iraq in ’03, his gang of thugs used to brag about plans to topple seven Middle Eastern countries in five years, then move north into the Caucusus and put nukes right on Russia’s border, two minutes flight time from Moscow.
We’re on the same program to this day. We just sent missiles to Poland, and if all goes well, we’ll one day have Ukraine in NATO, Tajikistan, Georgia — what’s to stop us?
“Pretty soon, the enemy will be Assad again…”
Sorry, the enemy will always be any stable locally run Middle Eastern regime. This goes back as far as history has Empires. Mr. Assad will not have to do any dirty deeds to get whacked. Yesterdays shooting down of the Syrian fighter jet by Israel for infringing Israeli claimed airspace by one half of a mile shows this. How long does it take an aircraft flying six hundred knots to travel one half of a mile? Was it flying in a straight line or sweeping a curve as it transited? Was the pilot warned beforehand? Even the Israelis admit that this unfortunate pilot was not posing a threat to them. They did it because they could. That’s the Logic of Empire in action. Make no mistake, a tipping point was passed. Diplomacy has been abandoned in favour of brute force, in public. Mr. Putin and the nomenklatura in the Kremlin will take notice and act accordingly. Expect Assad to start receiving vast amounts of ‘assistance’ from old East Bloc powers soon. The Kremlin has to push back against the Neoliberal Empire somewhere, hard. Syria is their logical choice. It is an old ally, and a Middle Eastern version of the Modernist Peoples State. I’m waiting for RT or Pravda to do a long interview with Assad on the difficulties of running a state under siege. The West piled all in and tried to subvert Ukraine, which is on Russia’s doorstep for heavens’ sake. Now it will be Russia’s turn.
i’m quite sure that putin has been well aware of america’s intentions re syria for a long time and has been building contingency plans accordingly. none of the actions so far have caught him off guard.
the main risk is another false flag a la MH17 wherein the syrian regime is lulled into a state of complacency by america’s seeming cooperation in destroying mutual enemies, then bam! assad is the greatest evil since hitler again. the “international community” will once again rise in condemnation and put more pressure on putin, the big monster, over supporting assad, the other monster, and another stand-off ensues.
if you feel so passionately about this issue then I suggest you research where these fighters came from, where they got their money, their training and their arms. They didn’t just pop-up out of the soil as an all-conquering army. I won’t point you there–find out. Hint–its very unusual that when two armies clash and one of them far outnumbers the other and outguns it that when its officers order a general retreat we can see something fishy going on. That is what happened–and, conveniently, ISIS picked up a ton of U.S. weapons. Also, conveniently, the manage to figure out just the sort of activity that would be sure to get the U.S. involved in war in the region. If they were on the up and up and who they claimed to be why would they deliberately provoke the U.S. to bomb them? Why? I had the same question following last year’s alleged gas attack–why would Assad who was beginning to win the war do something that was bound to get calls for the U.S. to enter the war? Why? Assad, is no dope and he was being advised by Lavrov who is clearly brilliant.
Imagine, you are kicking ass in your little area of the world–with your gangster chums raping and looting a neighborhood. You know the cops aren’t really interested and will just pass by–so what do you do?–you take a gun and start shooting at a passing patrol car–I mean really–WTF would you think?
“If they were on the up and up and who they claimed to be why would they deliberately provoke the U.S. to bomb them?”
Well, why did the Germans decide to invade Russia during WW2? For the same reason: their leaders are flaming egomaniacs!
Let me put it as clearly as possible: Germany possessed the mightiest Army in the world in 1939. It would have won in the Russian front had Hitler kept out of the way and let his General Staff run the war. Comparing IS to Germany is a little bit silly on the level of Monte Python don’t you think? I’m not sure they can measure up to the Syrian Army and certainly not the Iranians, Turks or Israelis.
Couldn’t agree with you more.
Banger,
That whimsical. As unstrategic as Hitler was , Stalin was at least, and probably more crazy. The reality is it was a numbers game,Germans could never conquer and hold Russia. Not enough soldiers.
The withdrawal of SU industrial infrastructure to the Urals sealed the fate of the Germans in their endeavor.
“During the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941–1942, the mountains became a key element in Nazi planning for the territories which they expected to conquer in the USSR. Faced with the threat of having a significant part of the Soviet territories occupied by the enemy, the government evacuated many of the industrial enterprises of European Russia and Ukraine to the eastern foothills of the Urals, considered a safe place out of reach of the German bombers and troops. Three giant tank factories were established at the Uralmash in Sverdlovsk (as Yekaterinburg used to be known), Uralvagonzavod in Nizhny Tagil, and Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant in Chelyabinsk. After the war, in 1947–1948, Chum – Labytnangi railway, built with the forced labor of Gulag inmates, crossed the Polar Urals.”
Agreed on the Urals. And it’s not like the Russians hadn’t been through that before, and didn’t know what to do:
Monte Hall; Monty Python (Full Monty).
I believe that ISIS includes a faction of Iraqi Generals; the same one’s Bush decided not to, er, buy off and fired, leading to a good deal of enmity.
So if ISIS is able to act like a real Army, that might be because it is one.
heelot…
seriously…usually agree wityah but you’ve been watching too much of the hitler channel…you should read orwells homage to catalonia…next thing you will be saying the nazis won the election of 1933…NOT….
don’t confuse the editing work of leni riefenstahl with reality…remember…they came across with horse drawn carriages into poland and there were these guys waving red flags on the other side sorta kinda helping…last I checked…the great german war machine lost about 25% of its aircraft in the first two weeks…it was a little bit different than the turkey shoot they had gotten their “experience” with in spain…
hitler begged the japanese to sign the damned cease fire with russia so that the russians would finally invade poland…and last I checked barbarossa was pushed back to June from march because of some little guy from the island in greece my family is from…first peasant and first worker…pushed that elmer fuddish il duce back through albania in october of 1940, forcing hitler on Nov 22, 1940 to adjust his invasion plans for russia…
kinda hate that the little man with the glasses who graduated from that prussian military academy is unknown, forgotten or distorted…remember…to the victor go the history books…he has been white washed from history…the october 28 celebration in greece is not forgotten…but what little is said about him attempts to turn his “ropa-a-dope” strategy to keep the fascists away long enough for him to build the metaxas line into love for his future enemies in black…it has been converted to some argument that his playing and dressing like his future enemies was not a strategic plan…oh well…at least he got the germans to enjoy that winter with those shorts…so there i no way a leni movie turns into reality…thats almost like saying there were wheelbarrows of money being carted around in germany after ww one…you do realize that is a myth right…there are no such photos anywhere…gotta love those nazis…they are really good at changing history…
Morning Every one,
It is true that marriage is no more an easy act with uncertainity factors surrounding my life. I am 35 work as a consultant. I made the choice not to ever get married. Or I am sure the woman who wants to marry me would like to see me have a full time job. I am trying my best to get a full time position. There are n’t too many. Sadly that is true. It will get worse.
That’s an interesting line of thought. Marriage as social contract; very Victorian if I may say so. The full time job issue is related to the costs of raising young, eh? If you find a person who looks at just you, and ignores the rest, hang on to them. They are priceless, in the literal sense. (Oh, and you don’t have to formally marry anyone. Several years of living together gets the same result.) Don’t despair. You are the same age as my wife was when we got married. That was thirty some odd years ago. You’re thinking seriously about the issue. That’s a good first step.
(Sorry for the off topic rant.)
I personally do not understand the logic of marriage when there are not certain things at stake, or at least involved in the equation:
-semi religious family/social group who will keep hectoring you if you don’t (I have a totally hippie ex-Catholic friend who occasionally asks when my mate of 15 years is going to “make an honest woman out of me”)
-children, as marriage formalizes their rights in case of death and over whose care one’s own rights are formalized
-property at issue
otherwise, why get the government involved?
Perhaps marriage is like a Ponzi scheme.
The original invested amount of love is never enough.
One needs to keep investing in more love to pay out love-dividends from earlier love-investments.
And maybe it’s not such a bad thing.
That’s a great metaphor for a financial blog. The best part of it is that love is the ultimate renewable resource. It takes lots of work, but that’s the growing up part.
“I give them 6 months, tops.”
Yes. If all the nations that say they abhor IS/ISIS work to destroy IS/ISIS, then they should be seriously weakened in 6 months. Unless they get covert support (no nation can provide overt support).
We shall see.
Note: MoA (in today’s links) makes the point that airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq have not been very effective and muses that the airstrikes in Syria will likely also not damage ISIS significantly. I’d also add that the airstrikes might actually help as a recruitment tool.
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H O P
I’m sorry, but I’ve never been a fan of the “resistance will only make things worse” theory. When you identify an entity that is unquestionably evil, you have an obligation to resist. And I don’t buy the “oh it’s all just a lot of US propaganda” theory either. ISIS itself has gone out of its way to advertise its monstrousness to the world. The sort of people who are being drawn to them would be antisocial psychopaths in any case and under any circumstances.
I’ve never been a fan of people who use “I’m sorry” as a rhetorical device to precede a statement utterly lacking in sorrow.
Nor am I a fan of people who ignore our long history of making things worse in the Middle East by bombing. Of course, it’s always bombing for humanitarian purposes.
Somehow the people we are allegedly helping always end up worse off. But the energy companies, M.I.C., and Israel lobby get what they wanted.
~
Testify.
Very insightful. The truth is rather obvious from our results in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, etc., unless of course you’re a member of the MIC. The War on Terra (Lambert), is a guaranteed breeder reactor, producing more fuel than it consumes, an elegant perpetual war machine. The proponents of the latest war also conveniently ignore the paternity of ISIS, begotten in Langley, Tel Aviv, and Riyadh. ISIS will be sustained as necessary for imperial aims, as was al-Qaeda before it and the Mujahedin before that.
I’m not a fan of learning from history (like the last decades worth of u.s. intervention), no sir ree. /sarc
So complete chaos, lack of all infrustructure, dead children (and adults), u.s. bombing, the bad guy du jour. I tell history in reverse, cause it hurts, cause it hurts …
He bought the propaganda. Would you buy a used fire truck from this man?
https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5585/15130103230_e1df5cbf85_b.jpg
Well, I’ve never been a “fan” of people incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. Or as in your case, unwilling to do so.
I’ve never been a fan of people who define as “right” whatever action suits their ideological biases no matter what the real world effects of that action actually are.
Primum non nocere.
Bombing and killing should be used only when there is literally no case for doing *anything* else. That actually almost never happens, and never it turns out happens when it is neocons calling for war.
How many times we gotta stick our pecker into the hornet’s nest expecting a good or “right” result?
Harsh and unwarranted.
Sorry, but that covers Fundamentalists anywhere and anytime. It’s just a step away from staging nasty ‘demonstrations’ at burials of gays to stoning them to death, because it’s in the Bible, or Koran, or Precepts of Glakii. People drawn to such groups I would consider to be ‘social’ psychopaths. They just have a very narrow definition of society.
the real antisocial psycopaths go into politics or the c-suite
docg–
“ISIS itself has gone out of its way to advertise its monstrousness to the world”
That alone should make you think twice. Real political movements express themselves in a way that (to their own minds, at least) is positive. Instead we get fake beheading videos of pale-skinned dudes. It’s enough to make you wonder who the target of this particular psyop is, and who is financing it, and why.
Those who really care about what is good in the world will keep a level head, and not take hot actions based on extravagant stories. Especially media stories.
–Gaianne
Gaianne;
The problem with “those who really care about what is good in the world” is that they are severely underrepresented in the global elites.
Sting of Betrayal: George Soros and Cristina Kirchner Wolf Street. A tad overwrought but the general point holds.
So you can imagine my utter shock on Monday when it was announced that Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, one of the strongest candidates for culprit numero uno of putting in place unsustainable trends that should be reversed sooner rather than later, was to meet with George Soros in New York. Cristina is in New York for the UN meeting to seek support in resolving the technical default brought about by the infamous “vulture” funds.
Interesting read. If I had to choose the lesser evil billionaire, though, George Soros is an easy choice over Paul Elliott Singer.
~
It’s an interesting situation. The head of a sovereign state consults with a powerful private individual because the State has failed to address her issues in a fair and reasoned manner. This is classic neo feudalism in action.
I forgot to include a link showing how despicable Paul E. Singer is.
~
It reminds me of the movie, Godfather.
If you have any problems with one boss, just ask help from another boss.
At least, that’s how it works in movies. In the real world, I don’t know.
As Banger has reminded us, everything we need to know about realpolitik can be found in Godfather 1-3. “I spend my life trying not to be careless… I never wanted this for you… thought that you would be the one to hold the strings, Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone…”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuWkcKbBQkg
Sherlock the beagle will return items you may have left on the plane when you deplane at Schiplol: http://consumerist.com/2014/09/24/sherlock-the-beagle-will-return-the-items-you-left-on-the-plane-if-youre-in-amsterdam-that-is/
RE: Reprivatising the internet: how physics helps you hide from spooks
Before anybody runs off to register an account with ProtonMail let me provide some arguments against doing so. To be an excellent code maker you need three major qualifications;
1) A background in mathematics. Okay, they have this covered.
2) A high level of experience with computer coding, preferably in multiple languages. Even if your math is solid the underlying programming can be compromised.
3) Experience with breaking other people’s ciphers. To create good encryption that is hard to break… do I really need to explain this one?
Who possesses all these factors in abundance? It ain’t ProtonMail.
“That inaccessibility is partly because ProtonMail’s servers are in Switzerland, where the law prevents government agencies from gaining access to them.”
Gahaha! As funny as it sounds the only barrier to NSA collection of SIGINT is US law. Basing their service in a foreign country only makes it easier for NSA to legally collect it. It’s called espionage. The fact the author misses this completely means they have zero business discussing these matters.
“There are ways to perform reversible mathematical operations on data that will render it indecipherable to prying eyes. As long as you have the key – that is, you know exactly what the mathematical operation was – you can undo the obfuscation.”
…and it’s not like the NSA, or any other SIGINT agency for that matter, hires PhD mathematicians to reverse-engineer these equations.
“In August, ProtonMail held a hackathon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
The MIT exercise proved the people behind ProtonMail have little experience with numbers two and three on my initial list of qualifications. Considering the venue and the open source factor the NSA has probably already done their homework on ProtonMail. But, but, SCIENCE. Yeah, the NSA will probably be the first organization to possess a quantum computer.
Fight the power. RAWR!
They are proposing the final product as an open source project. This means the code will probably be written and most certainly examined by a number of people that meet your criteria in number 2 as well as number 3. I am aware of the recent “gotcha” that went into the https opens source project where a poorly chosen memory allocation routine allowed sneak attack reads/code injection, but open source is nevertheless generally pretty robust at least by the standards you outline.
If I understood the article correctly, and that is far from certain, these people have come up with methods that they consider unbreakable due to laws of physics which can not be reverse engineered in the same way a purely mathematical encryption scheme could. Based on the truth of that assertion (again if I understood correctly) – and they do seem qualified for that – this would be a robust product as long as your key was not compromised. Somewhat of a big if, unfortunately.
My comment was intended for Andrew Watts‘ comment above.
Not e-mail, but I looked at this hopefully: At the recent New Zealand town hall about Five Eyes mass surveillance, there was a panel onstage including Glenn Greenwald and Kim Dotcom, and then both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden (wow) participated via video link, and Kim said this:
I looked up Mega on wikipedia and don’t see this discussed. But come on, Mega!
Actually, the poignant thing is the photo in the New Statesman article — a row of U.S. Mail mailboxes. Such nostalgia! Remember when we had constitutionally protected mail with big fines for anyone tampering with it? Our sucky situation now includes a failure of the USPS to provide e-mail. That’s actually where I think we should start. I mean, don’t you wonder why the USPS doesn’t provide e-mail, and why all the efforts to kill the USPS and sell off its buildings, evaporate it, make us forget it? The Constitution was there. Our legal, national commons was there. Even if someone does come up with secure e-mail in Switzerland (come on, Switzerland!), it’s still us versus evil government, not us included in a government we make and trust and can repair. The NSA is rotting and dissolving democratic governments globally, which was one of Assange’s points.
I think your last paragraph is spot on! As to Dotcom, if only for that name alone I wouldn’t trust his encryption package any further than I could throw a cement truck. I watched the broadcast you mention and it was good to hear Glenn and Julian, and even Dotcom’s lawyer was compelling, but the whole thing was still a little suspect due to Dotcom’s being so much a part of it. That guy is out for the buck and hasn’t been too scrupulous in the past about how he makes it.
‘Just one moment. There are two ways to fight mass surveillance. Number one is politically, and that’s what we are trying to do here in New Zealand at this election. Number two, with technology’
Even impressive advances in 2 should not obscure the fact that all our energies really ought to go into 1. As Andrew says ‘The idea that a bunch of crypto novices are going to beat the NSA at their own game is firmly in magical unicorn territory’ Anything we can do they can do better. 2 is the stop-gap, the last resort, the sensible thing to do while the battle for 1 is being fought.
If we, under the erroneous impression that 1 is impossible, concentrate on 2, we will be forever behind the 8 ball, watching our backs. If we go for broke with 1 and make progress, then it is the NSA, should they continue with the democracy-destroying skulduggery, which will be forever behind the 8 ball, watching their back, afraid of the law of the land. And that’s how it should be.
1) I know I don’t, but I also don’t think Andrew has the definitive word on the feasibility of ProtonMail specifically or more generally with efforts using new and possibly fool proof techniques such as those coming from physics.
2) It is likely that our system collapses before you get the NSA (or whatever secretly replaces it) to change by political or other means. Intrusion and big data is irrevocably tied up with immensely powerful elite political and financial and corporate interests. This information means big money and the perception of finely tuned control to them and you are going to take that away over their dead bodies.
3) Collapse will probably take a considerable amount of time. Long enough so none of us are around or so we are too out of it to care one way or another. When collapse does come, you may no longer need your computer for much anyway. In the meantime, and this is scary but distinctly possible, you may find connectivity becomes far more of a burden than it is worth – even if you could legally just throw all of it away.
So no matter how catchy you find Andrew’s hyperbole, you are most likely stuck with digital or non governmental solutions if you want digital privacy. And this effort has a strong political effect, probably more than marches, in that it forces government to become more and more explicit in their abuse and illegal disregard of the constitution.
@Glenn Condell
Or we’re all end up as political prisoners. But I’m trying to stay positive.
I think you’re overestimating how many people have the complete skillset. The idea that a bunch of crypto novices are going to beat the NSA at their own game is firmly in magical unicorn territory. Underestimating their capabilities is why so many people were surprised by the Snowden disclosures. Whether the science is sound or not they are practically begging for trouble by advertising themselves as an email service the NSA couldn’t break. This could also be a very creative honeypot.
Which brings us to my intermediate level of concern. To compromise somebody’s communications they first have to believe that they’re secure. That’s a very basic rule of comsec. Nor is open source software a panacea to solving the dilemma of internet security. We can argue whether NSA/GCHQ was behind Heartbleed but the fact is nothing is stopping them from becoming a trusted code contributor and then compromising the email service down the line.
“Based on the truth of that assertion (again if I understood correctly) – and they do seem qualified for that – this would be a robust product as long as your key was not compromised. Somewhat of a big if, unfortunately.”
They don’t need to break the encryption to harvest metadata. Think about TOR.
Not easy to argue your points. I’m assuming that to be workable as open source, the algorithm would include some aspect of physics that would work even if the NSA were to write the package themselves.
The relevant sections in the article were:
Is it indeed something the NSA can’t get around as long as the source is open? BTW, I think the author of the article simply goofed when he spoke of Swiss law as protecting the algorithm from the NSA since he went on to point out it would eventually be open source.
Your point about the skill set may well be insurmountable in practical terms and is beyond me to comment on, but I’m fairly sure that some of that could be made up for by an iterative cycle of review, testing and revision. Again, if it could be made to work at all, It would come down to who did the review and testing.
Since there are really no secrets from the NSA if something is intended for general use, I don’t see the validity of your point about open discussion being the worst possible way to get this done. Assuming it was somehow concealed, even from the NSA, what good would it be for anyone else? They would either be in the dark as well or the NSA would know about it. One or the other. Code developed in private and then stripped to thwart reverse engineering or some such measure strike me as a fools errand, and completely untrustworthy.
As to metadata, indeed, this would do nothing to protect it, but the article made no claims about that.
“Not easy to argue your points. I’m assuming that to be workable as open source, the algorithm would include some aspect of physics that would work even if the NSA were to write the package themselves.”
That wasn’t my intention. Not necessarily, if they’re using an algorithm or fix the code so that it repeats a key sequence they should be able to break it. That’s how the NSA broke the Soviet Union’s one time pad system back in the 1950s. This is all theoretical but I wouldn’t expect the NSA to try a brute force attack against that system of encryption. It’s not worth the effort when there is easier methods of decryption.
“Is it indeed something the NSA can’t get around as long as the source is open?”
Any flaws or bugs are open to exploit. That possibility should provide an answer why I’m skeptical about open source as an effective means of providing security. Even if they’re using some kind of polymorphic encryption scheme.
“Assuming it was somehow concealed, even from the NSA, what good would it be for anyone else?”
Good question, I don’t really have a satisfactory answer. Any closed system would have to be based upon trust which brings us back to a basic rule of comsec.
“As to metadata, indeed, this would do nothing to protect it, but the article made no claims about that.”
Which is just more proof the author doesn’t know what they’re talking about and this particular scheme is not free from being compromised by NSA or it’s foreign equivalents.
Your first response above, oblique attack, and then later, “Any flaws or bugs are open to exploit” is really the crux of the matter. But without the concept of open source (if not the practical application) you run into the rule of comsec you reference later regarding how one can trust a black box.
But the need and perceived need for privacy is almost as overwhelming (perhaps even more so) as the need and perceived need for intrusion and data collection and the domain lends itself somewhat to asymmetrical effort, so short of a political and legal solution – which won’t happen except as window dressing – we are left with some form of transparent solution or nothing.
Why does an encryption system that can tell you if it is being tampered with have to also solve the problem of meta data? Isn’t it just one part of the overall solution? Would not TOR be fine if it had such an encryption system? I have not been following closely but I hear TOR has recently come into serious question so please excuse if I’m missing a big chunk of information here.
Note, my understanding is that TOR is trustworthy, if at all, on a specialized uncompromised read only box and even then overuse can result in attack. So as a general product it’s not very useful which means as a practical matter, metadata is still open to collection. Have additional weaknesses been found?
*snip* “so short of a political and legal solution – which won’t happen except as window dressing – we are left with some form of transparent solution or nothing.”
I don’t agree but I’m leaving it at that.
“Why does an encryption system that can tell you if it is being tampered with have to also solve the problem of meta data? Isn’t it just one part of the overall solution?”
The mass collection of metadata is just as much of a privacy concern when the NSA is attempting to own the ‘net. It’s an interconnected problem.
“I have not been following closely but I hear TOR has recently come into serious question so please excuse if I’m missing a big chunk of information here.”
Way off topic, there has been research surrounding exit nodes that can compromise the whole system. Not really a problem if you’re a spook using a US government server but kinda a problem for people who think they’re hiding their activities from the government. Foreign activists and such who risk their lives who also unfortunately rely on TOR.
I think you’re overestimating how many people have the complete skillset. The idea that a bunch of crypto novices are going to beat the NSA at their own game is firmly in magical unicorn territory. Underestimating their capabilities is why so many people were surprised by the Snowden disclosures. Whether the science is sound or not they are practically begging for trouble by advertising themselves as an email service the NSA couldn’t break. This could also be a very creative honeypot.
Which brings us to my intermediate level of concern. To compromise somebody’s communications they first have to believe that they’re secure. That’s a very basic rule of comsec. Nor is open source software a panacea to solving the dilemma of internet security. We can argue whether NSA/GCHQ was behind Heartbleed but the fact is nothing is stopping them from becoming a trusted code contributor and then compromising the email service down the line.
“Based on the truth of that assertion (again if I understood correctly) – and they do seem qualified for that – this would be a robust product as long as your key was not compromised. Somewhat of a big if, unfortunately.”
They don’t need to obtain the key to harvest metadata.
Banger 1:55 that’s a stupid thing to say. With your ineluctable logic you have also proved that the kiddy-raping priests swapping photos at the Vatican mean that statutory rape law is all gone. That OJ proved homicide is OK now. Іван Миколайович Дем’янюк had a mostly long and peaceful life, so that means the Nazis won.
Criminals get away with shit sometimes. Your everything-sucks tantrum is what’s childish.
What? If you want to dis me then do so with some heart, man. Tell me something more than just layin’ rubber on the street–cause that don’t prove you can race.
I love your hopeful vision of the scum that run the US getting brought to justice but you never discuss how exactly it’s going to happen, and it’s far from childish to question the plausibility of it happening.
Justice under law always lies somewhere along a continuum—in any given society. Since most of us are not expecting to ever see perfect, complete justice established everywhere at the same time and to endure that way, you both have a certain point. But neither of you can claim any clear victory for your interpretation at this point.
There are indeed societies which are so thoroughly and so consistently lacking in so many of the essentials of justice that it is absurd to suppose that, merely because they have courts and judges, and because they make a pretense of respect for legal fairness, that the real problem is only that justice doesn’t always prevail there. No, the salient fact is that justice practically never prevails there– and in these cases, we can rightly say that these are societies in which justice doesn’t exist.
In the converse, there are societies where justice has enough of a regularity—or this has been true at times in the course of their histories–that one could very reasonably ascribe miscarriages of justice as part of the inevitable imperfections of all human endeavors. But to do that, to make that argument, the failures of justice really do have to be more the exception than the rule. Real justice requires institutions which have sufficient regularity of form and procedure, sufficient reliability in outcomes so that most of the time, very similar fact-sets produce highly reliable very similar outcomes. That this isn’t easy doesn’t prove it’s impossible. That it’s possible doesn’t make it–even eventually, over a very long time– inevitable.
For justice to exist, people have to refuse to accept that it is either a hopeless cause or a very near certainty given “enough time.” Defendants and their rights are not immortal and once these are definitively lost, so is the chance for them to offer evidence that there really is such a thing as justice. For, in their case, there wasn’t, and, as far as they are concerned, occasional outcomes of justice might as well be ascribed to accidents.
But justice can’t be merely the accidental production of a rightful outcome.
re: “More Americans Forgo Marriage as Economic Difficulties Hit Home,” WSJ Economics. “Wait, aren’t we in a recovery?”
Nope. Still no recovery.
You do have to wonder about this little bit of editorializing from the WSJ though:
“For many Americans, staying single, cohabiting or raising children out of marriage increasingly looks like the best available option.”
People voluntarily don’t get married due to a bad economy, but they voluntarily go off and have kids by themselves due to a bad economy.
Really?
http://munchies.vice.com/articles/we-spoke-to-a-90-year-old-farmer-who-grows-pumpkins-the-size-of-cows/
@ran, good question. There is a reductive concept of jus cogens that often causes banger’s goinsouth/mexico sort of facile despair. Serious crimes of concern to humanity are not like speeding, where some asshole authority stops you and gives you a ticket. The most serious crimes are more in the nature of farting in an elevator. You can get away with it once in a while. But if you do it a lot at work, or where you live, you will be made to pay in oh so many ways. You will not be so successful with the babes, or much of a big shot in meetings. All sorts of administrative sanctions are apt to be unfairly applied until you choose to go away.
Recent sophisticated work on peremptory norms emphasizes the concept of acculturation. Nomeklatura and heads of state want to fit in. It’s like the redneck at a concert, nobody makes him stop clapping between movements, he just does. Who made serial assassin and aggressor G.H.W. Bush effect ratification of the ICCPR? Nobody. But now it is all that remains of your rights. All because that blood-dripping animal Poppy wanted to fit in. When the Soviet Union killed itself, who wound up running its successor state? International law specialist V. Putin, currently the world’s most influential advocate of jus cogens.